The season 2024/25 with Kirill Petrenko

Great symphonic music is at the beginning and end of Kirill Petrenko’s concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker during the 2024/25 season. In between, an arc extends from Viennese Classicism to the present, focussing on the chief conductor’s programming over the years: orchestral works from the Austro-German tradition, music from the Slavic repertoire, compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries and opera.

Anton Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony will be heard at the season opening and on three evenings in September; Kirill Petrenko conducts a work by this composer with the Berliner Philharmoniker for the first time. Symphonic music from the DNA of the Berliner Philharmoniker – by Ludwig van Beethoven (“Pastoral”), Johannes Brahms (the Second Piano Concerto, with Daniil Trifonov) and Antonín Dvořák (the Seventh Symphony) – is spread over the season. Music by Sergei Rachmaninoff, a composer from Kirill Petrenko’s native country, that has been familiar to him since his childhood will be presented on two programmes: first, the tone poem The Isle of the Dead, which he now also wants to play before an audience after a performance during the lockdown, and second, a concert performance of the one-act opera Francesca da Rimini. More Russian music will be heard with Sofia Gubaidulina’s apocalyptic spiritual work The Wrath of God.

Modernist music is featured often on Kirill Petrenko’s programmes, ranging from its beginnings to the present day. Creative mavericks of the 20th century will be heard – including the violin concertos by Edward Elgar (with Frank Peter Zimmermann) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (with Vilde Frang). The latter work, composed in American exile, was a curiosity since it is filled with melodies and motifs from Korngold’s Oscar-winning film scores. Jean Sibelius is another unconventional figure of the 20th century; in his Lemminkäinen Suite he depicts the adventures of the not at all heroic hero of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The most recent music includes Miroslav Srnka’s composition Superorganisms – a commissioned work that will be heard as a German premiere during the Biennale Paradise Lost? On the Threat to Nature. Also on Kirill Petrenko’s schedule for the season is the epochal work IN-SCHRIFT by this year’s Composer in Residence, Wolfgang Rihm.

As an acclaimed opera conductor, Kirill Petrenko is of course especially sought-after at the Easter Festival, whose new production will be presented in concert at the Philharmonie Berlin after the staged performances in Baden-Baden; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is on the agenda this year. Kirill Petrenko will devote his last concert of the season to Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which he not only regards as the composer’s “musical testament” but above all as a “visionary work”, whose influence as the “prototype for Modernist music” is perceptible to this day.